Support for one does not mean hatred for the other
In 2020, vying for Georgia’s two Senate seats, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock sometimes campaigned together, more frequently as the election grew closer. Because Ossoff is Jewish and Warnock is Black, their alliance harkened back to the civil rights movement, when Jewish Americans were among the staunchest supporters of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his cause.
Rabbis marched in protests alongside Black Christian ministers. Wealthy Jewish Americans generously funded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and other civil rights organizations. In 1958, a group of white supremacists calling themselves the ”Confederate Underground” bombed an Atlanta synagogue because of the outspoken support the senior rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, gave to the cause of equal rights for Black Americans.
That history has been lost. These days, too many young Black Americans have allowed their support for Palestinians to morph into a reflexive antisemitism. That’s most unfortunate — a dismissal of an important alliance and a drift into discrimination that Black Americans, more than most, ought to scrupulously avoid.
Since the Israeli war against Hamas began, acts of antisemitism, already rising in the U.S. as ugly biases of all sorts have reared up, have been exploding across the country. (So have racist acts against Muslims.) The Anti-defamation League reports an ”unprecedented” rise in antisemitic acts — vandalism at synagogues, hateful protest signs, even physical assaults on Jews.
The savage Oct. 7 attack by Hamas is indefensible. Full stop. The terrorists attacked civilians — raping and mutilating women, killing babies, murdering more than 1,200 in total. King would have been among the first to denounce those barbaric acts.
That hardly means, though, that Israel cannot be criticized. It’s a nation, and its leadership has varied over many years. It has had wise and thoughtful leaders such as Ehud Barak, who, at the urging of then-president Bill Clinton, offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and all of Gaza in 2000. (Arafat foolishly declined.)
Intermittently for 16 years, though, Israel has had a corrupt narcissist, Benjamin Netanyahu, as its leader — a smarter version of Donald Trump. He has remained in power only by making common cause with ultraconservative Israelis who want to wipe Palestine off the map. He has allowed Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, considered illegal under international accords, to flourish. He is trying to minimize the power of the Israeli Supreme Court so it cannot hold him to account. He should be criticized vigorously and constantly.
Too many American Jewish leaders are so staunchly proisrael that they dismiss any criticism of its government as antisemitism. Somehow, even calling for a cease-fire in the Israeli-hamas war has been redefined as antisemitism. Gaza has been reduced to rubble, hospitals demolished, children starving for lack of food. Support for a cease-fire is hardly support for Hamas.
Many young Black Americans relate to Palestinian suffering because Black citizens of this country have experienced generations of oppression — and the oppression of residents of the West Bank and Gaza is undeniable. In 2006, former President Jimmy Carter, who spent decades working to bring peace to the Middle East, published a book titled ”Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” outlining the humiliating treatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces. (That, too, was denounced by some as antisemitism.)
It is also true that Israel is a small country frequently attacked by terrorists who bomb buses and cafes and insist Israel has no right to exist. That’s harrowing for its citizens and its supporters because the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and outcasts were killed out of vicious hatred, is history just past.
In 1967, Jewish leader Adolph
Held expressed his concern to King about a conference in which the SCLC, King’s organization, participated that also included Arab leaders who blasted Zionism. (Does that sound like current events?) King responded in a letter to Held:
”Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable. At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.”
King was ever the prophet.